Top #5 Digital Marketing Stats for Your 2018 Strategy

The latest round of complete digital marketing statistics was recently released by the long-time trusted, data-drive source – Merkle’s Digital Marketing Q4 Report (DMR). The data reveals some astounding (and some also not so surprising) statistics and insights that every digital marketer should know when evaluating your and optimizing your digital marketing strategy.

In this article you will discover some of the most useful stats in digital marketing today, ranging from SEO, to social media, to web video production. You will also be given insights from the data that you should use to develop your digital marketing strategy.

Social Media Paid Advertising:

1. Paid Facebook ad impressions drop 27%

This 27% drop in alignment with Facebook’s agenda to optimize the user experience, reformatting the content and content types that are put in front of user. In case you missed this, a couple months ago, Facebook publicly stated that they want users to see less business page and ad content, and more personal, original content coming from within the users’ network. As a result, the ad spend growth also went down significantly. Yes, the chart says +20%. However, the previous three quarters saw a 40% increase, so really the growth of ad spend is down significantly from the previous months.

I was actually surprised by this. I predicted the growth rate would be down, but I originally thought it would be less than 20%. This somewhat steady growth is likely a result of one of two things: 1. Marketers just were not fully aware of Facebook’s content plan, or 2. Facebook is still a strong resource for paid digital marketing. After all, it still has really great stats as far as impressions and conversions go, and has absolutely amazing resources that enable advertisers to target a very specific audience.

One of the highlights of the DMR is the investment and subsequent growth of Instagram. I am so happy this finally happened, because this is something I have predicted over the last several years. The reason for the increase in impressions (and let me be clear here, that this is not in the report, but a result of my own analysis and predictive marketing tactics) is they are simply “doing it right” oh behalf of their viewers.

Instagram has impressively found a way to provide the specific type of content that their audience wants. With Instagram… 1. You’ve always gotten visual content, which is both trendy and psychologically driven, 2. You’ve always gotten the latest content trend types (including stories, moving images, multi-image galleries, gifs and auto-playing short videos) 3. You’re always getting original, high-quality content that’s highly customized to each individual viewer. And it’s not polluted with fake news and ‘cheap’ advertisements. Because the content standards were set high from the beginning, the standards have always remained high. This is why the high-quality web video production is required for any video you plan to use on Instagram.

This also explains the 122% increase in ad spending. Another factor explaining the sharp increase in ad spend is the potential to monetize on Instagram’s recent December update, which allows users to follow specific hashtags. Additionally, as a Facebook-owned platform, marketers can take advantage of all the targeting capabilities that Facebook has to offer. For these reasons, it’s no wonder that Merkle predicts Instagram will continue to outpace that of Facebook.

3. Twitter Ad spend increased 44%, while the impression growth was only at 12%

While 12% does reflect a modest growth in impressions, this does not at all match the 44% increase in brands’ ad expenditure. The most likely reason for this increase is not from increased ad purchases, but instead the rising cost of click and impression pricing for Twitter – which they justify by saying that engagement is also going up. While I am biased, having never been a firm believer in Twitter marketing, I think that even Merkle would agree with me that paid Twitter ads should not be the largest portion of your social media budget this year.

Mobile Social Media

4. 75% of website visits from social media are done on a mobile device

Well, this one may not sound like anything new, but it’s an important reminder. It’s important because as a viewer (and potential customer) I, myself even find that it’s not always easy to access the website from the social page or post. Perhaps this is why only 4% of website visits come from social media. So make sure that it is easy for every viewer to access more of the information that peaked their interest from your social media page.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that perhaps social media shouldn’t be about bringing traffic to your website. If your primary goal is SEO, then you want the traffic and your social media should be optimized for that. However, if not, then you’re still getting impressions and giving valuable education to the viewer that is still contributing to your marketing efforts. In this case, focus on making a strong impression, but just a click to your website. As a social media user, I prefer my social media experience to stay within the platform (not going out to other web pages), but I am certainly still influenced by the content I see from businesses and ads. The best types of content for making strong impressions on your customers are always visual. The best content type is video, followed by moving images or gifs, custom images and infographics and then text.

Organic Search & SEO

5. Organic search produces largest growth in site visits in 2 years

The total number of website visits as a result of organic search grew by 6% – making this the strongest rate of growth since 2015. An even more notable number is the mobile organic search visits rate, which grew by 15% in the last several months.

We should also note that as advertisers were busy pushing bids for paid desktop search ads, this in turn, showed a slight rise in desktop organic search visits (after this percentage had fallen sharply the previous year). So content marketers, make sure to also keep up with paid advertising costs.

As digital marketers, we are all very aware that the digital marketing space is ever-changing. Two years ago, no one would have imaged Facebook’s impressions dropping 27 percent! This is why it is vital to keep up-to-date with the latest marketing trends and statistics. Use the most recent